Motivated Prediction of Future Feelings: Effects of Negative Mood and Mood Orientation on Affective Forecasts

Abstract

This article examines the role of motivational factors in affective forecasting. The primary hypothesis was that people predict positive emotional reactions to future events when they are motivated to enhance their current feelings. Three experiments manipulated participants' moods (negative vs. neutral) and orientation toward their moods (reflective vs. ruminative) and then assessed the positivity of their affective predictions for future events. As hypothesized, when participants adopted a reflective orientation, and thus should have been motivated to engage in mood-regulation processes, they predicted more positive feelings in the negative than in the neutral mood condition. This pattern of mood-incongruent affective prediction was not exhibited when participants adopted a ruminative orientation. Additionally, within the negative mood condition, generating affective forecasts had a more positive emotional impact on reflectors than on ruminators. The findings suggest that affective predictions are sometimes driven by mood-regulatory motives.

Using emotion as information in future-oriented cognition: Individual differences in the context of state negative affect

“…For example, individuals in an induced reflective versus ruminative state make more positive forecasts in a negative versus neutral mood (Buehler, McFarland, Spyropoulos, & Lam, 2007). Improved understanding of how trait following feelings interacts with state emotion may help specify how and when individual differences act in concert with versus against state factors in future-oriented cognition, including various dimensions of affect (e.g., arousal and valence) and characteristics of discrete emotions (e.g., sadness).…”

When idols look into the future: Fair treatment modulates the affective forecasting error in talent show candidates

“…As Wilson and Gilbert () stated: Finding ways to increase the accuracy of affective forecasts is a worthy enterprise – though not, we suspect, a particularly easy one (p. 134). To date, the studies that have answered this call have mostly focused on individual differences (e.g., mood orientation, Buehler, McFarland, Spyropoulos, & Lam, ; Big Five personality variables, Hoerger & Quirk, ; anxious attachment, Tomlinson, Carmichael, Reis, & Aron, ) and to a lesser extent on situational aspects that influence the affective forecasting error (e.g., self‐presentation, Dunn, Biesanz, Human, & Finn, ; temporal location, Gilbert, Gill, & Wilson, ; effect of learning, Wilson, Meyers, & Gilbert, ).…”

Today's misery and yesterday's happiness: Differential effects of current life-events on perceptions of past wellbeing

“…Quoidbach, Dunn, Petrides, and Mikolajczak's (2010) observation that exceptionally positive events decrease savoring of other positive events is compatible with this possibility. Moreover, given the parallels between thinking about the past and future (Buckner & Carroll, 2006), it is also worth exploring whether negative events create similar changes in anticipated satisfaction (Buehler, McFarland, Spyropoulos, & Lam, 2007).…”